The Kid

“I have received a fine education.”

Windy pretended he was only joshing, grinning as he ruffled Henry’s hair, which Windy knew he hated. The Kid shrugged away from it. Windy said, “Hell, we’re pals, right? We let bygones be bygones.”

The dealer said, “Your bet, Windy.”

Cahill scrutinized his cards and tossed in a nickel on his pair of fours. The cowpoke next to him raised to a quarter, and Cahill folded out of turn so he could face Henry with a policeman’s concern as he solemnly asked, “Would you mind if I asked you about your philandering?”

It was a new word to him. “Philandering?”

Seeming to think the Kid had the same arrangement with the Hog Ranch that John Mackie did, Windy asked with gravity, “Was it your momma who taught you how to pimp?”

Henry took a second to interpret the meaning, and then he stood up in his fury. “You son of a bitch! Don’t you say nothing about my mother!”

Windy hauled off and hit the Kid so hard in the stomach that he lost all his air in one of those will-I-ever-breathe-again oofs and fell to his knees. And that was not all. Windy jabbed his stovepipe boot against the Kid’s left shoulder, forcing him over onto the floor, and then he got up and lifted the Kid like he weighed no more than a gunnysack of sugar and slammed him down hard.

Like a child, Henry yelled, “Quit it!”

“But I’m just beginning to have fun!” the smithy said, and he wrestled the Kid up on his feet only to fiercely throw him down again. And then he squatted on him, his tonnage bucking up and down on Henry’s chest and denying the Kid inhalation. Windy slapped the Kid’s cheek and said, “You doll yourself up like some country jake . . . you waltz in here all brazen.” Windy slapped his other cheek. “Horse thieves oughta be in the hoosegow or strung up with a noose.”

The Kid caught enough breath to say, “Get off me, you sloppy bag of guts!”

Cantina drunks were

hooting and urging him on as Cahill found mean enjoyment in smacking the Kid’s hotheaded face left and right, reddening it scarlet.

Henry yelled, “Stop it! You’re hurting me!” like he was ten.

“I want to hurt you! That’s why I got you down,” Cahill said. But he seemed unaware that the Kid’s right hand was loose and squirming beneath Windy’s heavy hocks to find his hidden .44.

“You know what? Maybe I’ll bite off your nose so you won’t be so perty.” And Windy was flattening on the Kid, with his head sinking low and his teeth looking hungry for a meal of the Kid’s face, when the gun struggled its way to Windy’s belly and there was a loud bang! and the odor of singed shirt.

Windy said no more than “Oh” and fell onto his back, both hands holding his bleeding side. “I’m gut-shot,” he told the cantina.

“Well, he’s a goner then,” a farmer said to no one in particular. “Either he’ll bleed out or venoms will rot his insides.”

Waving gun smoke away, another man said, “Seen it happen. Ugly way to die.”

Windy’s face was squinched up in his agony as Henry scooted out from under him and got up on his shoes. Looking around, he saw no one felt called to do anything about him. “It was self-defense,” he explained. “It’s the Code of the West. He gave me no selection.”

Everybody was staring at him and noticing the still-hot gun in his hand.

The Kid then ran outside into a rain torrent and found a racehorse named Cashaw tied up next to his own, and stole the fleet Cashaw to get his gatherings in the tent of Sorghum Smith’s hay camp. The racehorse was soon run out with the getting there, so the Kid set it free to trot back to its owner, then stole another horse in Sorghum’s corral and headed east through high desert and monsoons, swapping used-up horses for fresh ones all the way to the New Mexico Territory. The practice was called hedge hopping.

Francis P. Cahill died in the extreme pain of internal hemorrhaging and sepsis the next morning, August 18, 1877, being survived by one sister in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and another in San Francisco. An inquest was soon held at the Hotel de Luna, and the six members of the jury ruled, “The shooting was criminal and unjustifiable, and Henry Antrim, alias Kid, is guilty thereof.”

Kid Antrim was already certain he was wanted for murder and changed his Christian names to their originals: William Henry. And for his alias he chose his mother’s maiden name of Bonney. William H. Bonney was a for-the-time-being thing, yet it would hold fast in people’s memories in places he’d never been.

- 5 -

THE BOYS

Hiding out in Apache Tejo, south of Silver City, the Kid affected moccasins, buckskin trousers, a long-sleeved white guayabera shirt, and a floppy sombrero. Even Mexicans at first thought him Mexican until they noticed his ojos azules. Rustling stray calves from herds along the Rio Grande became his nightly livelihood, and in the afternoons he practiced for hours on end to become a pistolero, quick-drawing and twirling his Samuel Colt, shooting it from whichever hand until the gun barrel and cylinder were hot enough to burn his skin. Even showed off for his compadres by spurring his stolen horse into a gallop and tipping over from his saddle to fire from underneath the horse’s flank and whang fruit cans into flight. His friends hooted and yelled and whistled their flabbergasted praise.

Word came to the Kid that Richard Knight, the proprietor of the meat market in Silver City, had won the contract for a stagecoach depot on his livestock ranch near the Burro Mountains, about twenty miles southeast of their former hometown. And because of a smallpox epidemic in the city, Josie Antrim had taken employment there as a horse tender.

Wanting to visit his older kinfolk, the fugitive from justice rode over to the depot with two Indian friendlies and, being judged Mexican, was at first scowled at through a dining room window by Mrs. Sara McKnight. She then recognized the Kid and jerked her head left, nosing him to the horse stables. The friendlies walked their horses to the water tank and drank of it themselves.

Josie was currying a Clydesdale in a stall with what’s called a dandy brush when he happened to glance over the animal’s croup and was surprised by his little brother. He let the brush drop to the straw and hurried around the Clydesdale saying, “Oh, oh, oh, Henry!”